Nice--Firenze

I am in Florence and back in a place where I can get Wifi. We spent the last 4 days in an apartment in Nice, which was fantastically roomy and had 2 balconies with a view of the mountains and palm trees and an old-style cage elevator that scared Reba so much she wouldn't take her luggage into it for fear of breaking it with the added weight. I discovered my phone wasn't getting WiFi after I got a text from Rogers telling me id managed to use up half my data for the month researching the difference between a sling and a cocktail (very important business).

Nice was beautiful, hot, and primarily populated by very rich old tourists. I decided to give in to the temptation of the patisserie on our corner and bought an almond macaron, to the ridicule of my peers (apparently its crazy to want to buy a macaron in France, go figure. I mean it was possibly the sweetest thing I had ever put in my mouth and I made them help me finish it even though it was roughly the size of a toonie, but still. Delicious).

Then we tried to figure out French Laundromats and I became very cross with my travel buddies because they were more interested in helping me figure out how to put my washer on a spin cycle than they were in letting me finish A Farewell To Arms on the laundromat floor. Nice. Wild times happen there. 

Paris when it sizzles

60% humidity and 28 dégrées. I was not made for this sort of weather. But we ran into a bunch of Australians on the street the other day who weren't made for this place either. They had on jackets over sweaters over tshirts with toques on. We were in sun dresses. The one with the most layers asked us if we weren't cold and then reminded himself we were Canadian...i suppose they don't come from the three dog night region.

Visited Shakespeare and Company, which may have been a great place for the lost generation to hang out but nowadays spending more than 30 minutes in this pit of awestruck tourists would be a bit hard on the brain. Its a pretty fantastic bookstore, if course. I immediately began dreaming of winning the lottery so I can open a bookstore like that, since clearly the world needs more of those.

I've spent the last 20 minutes trying to give wardrobe advice to our new Brazilian roommate who has made me realize just how little conversational Spanish I have. Why she's asking outfit advice from a Canadian girl wearing pajamas at 8pm with white wine splashes on her glasses is beyond me (tip: do not walk around while drinking anything in a 10*10 room filled with bunkbeds. Results are...inevitable...), but it was a bonding experience.

Paris

I could have stayed in Spain forever (Barcelona in particular) not least because I could understand some of the language most of the time, and they put more effort into the design of a sidewalk than Winnipeg does into the design of its government buildings. I also just felt comfortable there, for all that ordering food was quite intimidating and we never did manage to get them to give us separate bills.

Now we are in Paris, in a 4-bed hostel room with black and white wallpaper designed to look faded. It may also be designed to look peeling, but I suspect that just came to it naturally. We are sharing the room with an Israeli pastry chef doing a stint in a Parisian patisserie. The room is so small if anyone wants to move around the room everyone else has to too, and there are footprints on the ceiling, and this all just feels about right for Paris. Having a room mostly to ourselves is an absolute luxury after the 16-bed Madrid hostel where someone was always coming inbat 3am and someone else was always getting up at 5 to catch a flight, or even the Barcelona hostel we shared with 4 Ontario girls, two German girls, and one poor man from Missouri who had to listen to us talk about how much we liked the German girl's skirt and which Harry Potter character is the hottest. Last night I dreamed the pastry chef had us secretly moved to another hostel in the night because she didn't like the hours we kept, and we had to share a room with six Australians who didn't understand what we were upset about. In reality she is very nice and gave us a delicious cookie to share yesterday. Today we are visiting the Eiffel tower (admiring it from afar) and some charming cemeteries.

Barcelona

We arrive in Barcelona and catch the metro to our hostel. Everyone is packed into the cars, our backs to the wall to avoid assaulting people with our backpacks (and to discourage pickpockets), and the train has just begun to move when there is a great commotion in the next car and someone pulls the emergency brake. We jolt to a stop and there is furious banging on the glass door and a man shouting in Spanish (he is quite likely a tourist, although it seems everyone in Barcelona is at least bilingual so the fact that he's not swearing in catellan is not an indication that he doesn't speak it), and for a second I'm under the impression someone's been caught in the sliding doors. Then another passenger explains to us that a pickpocket stole the man's bag. He is reacting as though someone just kidnapped his child. Authorities come to the outside of the metro and after a belaboured conversation the train starts moving again. The man is NOT okay with this and pulls the emergency brake again, losing any sympathy anyone might have had for him. He threatens to break the glass doors down if they won't let him off the train (be now the pickpocket, his bag, and its contents are long gone, and its unclear what he hopes to accomplish by getting off here versus at the next metro stop). After some more conversation with the authorities, the man collapses on the ground in tears. A very unimpressed metro guard comes down the cars of the metro and finally leads the distraught man and his entirely disinterested wife to the staff exit doors, which he unlocks to let them out.

The train stalls once more for no apparent reason and then we are finally making our way to Catalunya. Once off the train we break out the map and try to track down our hostel, which is like raising a Tourist flag and inviting everyone to come offer you directions. Hold onto your bags, they tell us. The pickpockets are terrible here.

Yes, we say. Thank you. We know.

Becoming an early-riser

For most of my life I´ve been a notoriously early riser, and the whole thing can be blamed on one incredibly traumatizing incident that occurred when I was around the age of 6. My family had been visiting my aunt and travelled home by train, which took several days. After the first night spent on the train, I woke up rather late, and an absolutely horrifying thing had happened. My family had gone for breakfast without me. Not only that, but my sister had been allowed to keep the flower off the table in the dining car, and had brought it back to the sleeper car with her. When you are a child and you get to keep a real, live (and by that I mean freshly cut and slowly dying) flower from a train dining car, that puts you in the same class as your favourite Disney princess (which is probably Belle since she´s so smart and still gets to wear a ballgown and be emotionally abused by someone who you know deep down would be a nice guy if he wasn´t so hairy and would allow your sweetness to nurture his soul). My sister was a Disney princess who got hot breakfast and flowers and I was the sad anthropomorphic lamp (or tea cup or whatever) who slept until 11 on a train. So I learned at an early age that sleeping in is a sure-fire way to miss out on breakfast, romance, and all the other adventures that occur before noon on a weekday. For the next 15 years I shot out of bed at 7am.

Airplane trips and other things that are never as exciting as sitcoms would have led me to believe.

I know it is the job of a sitcom to make incredibly mundane events seem like hilarious adventures, but I still haven´t gotten over the fact that in real life, most flights, weddings, and attempts to order soup tend to go off without a hitch. Other than confusing my travel mates by becoming overly excited about buying a zebra print neck pillow, and getting loopy towards the end of the 22 hours we spent in transit*, the flight was rather like every other flight I´ve ever taken (as in, with a surprising lack of crashes, cannibalism, David Bowie or any other celebrity making a surprise appearance from the first class cabin, 10-hour delays, marriage proposals, escaped animals, or children being separated from their parents and ending up in New York City).

Pack light...

For me, the excitement of traveling has always been linked to an excessive willingness to sacrifice comforts along the way. This determination to experience hardship usually begins in the preliminary packing phase of trip preparations. I shove everything I need into a bag, decide the bag is too bulky, and convince myself that my trip will be ruined if I insist on bringing more than the barest of essentials with me (no way will my adventure be ruined by the misguided notion that I need both a toothbrush AND a hairbrush on this trip! Only one may stay!), as if backpacking through Europe is akin to fleeing the bolshevik revolution.

Inevitably, while I sacrifice an essential item, I will also have packed multiples of an item, or one bulky and oddly specific item, which I would only need in the rarest of cases. The result of this is an awkward conversation with my travel partners, about 8 hours in to the journey, when I have to explain why I made a conscious decision to leave my shampoo/towel/pajamas/clothes* behind, but I still brought my recorder/stapler/entire jewelry box with me. Will I regret packing three pairs of footwear, three kinds of tylenol, and all the bandaids I own, but only one pair of shorts when I arrive in Madrid?

Maybe. But in my mind, being in Europe will be such a grand adventure that having only one pair of shorts to wear for a 30 day stretch will hardly make a difference in the grand scheme of things (but having 3 different kinds of a headache could).

*That was an awkwardly memorable instance that did NOT make me any friends.